Literary self-consciousness: developments

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Literary self-consciousness:developments

Modernism and post-modernism: the redefinition of self-consciousness

Metafiction is a mode of writing within a broader culturalmovement often referred to as post-modernism. The metafictionalwriter John Barth has expressed a common feeling about the term‘post-modernism’ as ‘awkward and faintly epigonic, suggestiveless of a vigorous or even interesting new direction in the old art ofstorytelling than of something anticlimactic, feebly following avery hard act to follow’ (Barth 1980, p. 66). Post-modernism can beseen to exhibit the same sense of crisis and loss of belief in anexternal authoritative system of order as that which promptedmodernism. Both affirm the constructive powers of the mind in theface of apparent phenomenal chaos. Modernist self-consciousness,however, though it may draw attention to the aesthetic constructionof the text, does not ‘systematically flaunt its own condition ofartifice’ (Alter 1975a, p. x) in the manner of contemporarymetafiction.

Modernism only occasionally displays features typical of post-modernism: the over-obtrusive, visibly inventing narrator (as inBarth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Robert Coover’s Pricksongsand Descants (1969)); ostentatious typographic experiment (B. S.

22 Metafiction

Johnson’s Travelling People (1963), Raymond Federman’s Doubleor Nothing (1971)); explicit dramatization of the reader (ItaloCalvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979)); Chinese-boxstructures (Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), JohnBarth’s Chimera (1972)); incantatory and absurd lists (DonaldBarthelme’s Snow White (1967), Gabriel Josipovici’s TheInventory (1968)); over-systematized or overtly arbitrarilyarranged structural devices (Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa(1974)); total breakdown of temporal and spatial organization ofnarrative (B. S. Johnson’s ‘A Few Selected Sentences’ (1973));infinite regress (Beckett’s Watt (1953)); dehumanization ofcharacter, parodic doubles, obtrusive proper names (Pynchon’sGravity’s Rainbow (1973)); self-reflexive images (Nabokov’smirrors, acrostics, mazes); critical discussions of the story withinthe story (Fowles’s ‘The Enigma’ (1974), Barth’s Sabbatical(1982)); continuous undermining of specific fictional conventions(Muriel Spark’s quasi-omniscient author, Fowles’s very un-Victorian ending in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)); use ofpopular genres (Richard Brautigan’s A Confederate General fromBig Sur (1964), Vonnegut’s Slaughter-house-Five (1969)); andexplicit parody of previous texts whether literary or non-literary(Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew (1979), Alan Burns’s Babel(1969)).

In all of these what is foregrounded is the writing of the text asthe most fundamentally problematic aspect of that text. Althoughmetafiction is just one form of post-modernism, nearly allcontemporary experimental writing displays some explicitlymetafictional strategies. Any text that draws the reader’s attentionto its process of construction by frustrating his or her conventionalexpectations of meaning and closure problematizes more or lessexplicitly the ways in which narrative codes – whether ‘literary’ or‘social’ – artificially construct apparently ‘real’ and imaginaryworlds in the terms of particular ideologies while presenting theseas transparently ‘natural’ and ‘eternal’.

In 1945 Joseph Frank explained the self-referential quality ofmodernist literature in these terms:

Literary self-consciousness 23

Since the primary reference of any word group is to somethinginside the poem itself, language in modern poetry is reallyreflexive . . . instead of the instinctive and immediate referenceof words and word groups to the objects and events theysymbolize, and the construction of meaning from the sequenceof these references, modern poetry asks its readers to suspendthe process of individual reference temporarily until the entirepattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity.

(Frank 1958, p. 73)

In short, self-reflexiveness in modernist texts generates ‘spatialform’. With realist writing the reader has the illusion ofconstructing an interpretation by referring the words of the text toobjects in the real world. However, with texts like T. S. Eliot’s TheWaste Land (1922), in order to construct a satisfactoryinterpretation of the poem, the reader must follow the complex webof cross-references and repetitions of words and images whichfunction independently of, or in addition to, the narrative codes ofcausality and sequence. The reader becomes aware that ‘meaning’is constructed primarily through internal verbal relationships, andthe poem thus appears to achieve a verbal autonomy: a ‘spatialform’. Such organization persists in contemporary metafictionaltexts, but merely as one aspect of textual self-reflexivity. Indeed,‘spatial form’ may itself function in these fictions as the object ofself-conscious attention (for a discussion of this aspect of KurtVonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, see Chapter 5).

Post-modernism clearly does not involve the modernistconcern with the mind as itself the basis of an aesthetic, ordered ata profound level and revealed to consciousness at isolated‘epiphanic’ moments. At the end of Virginia Woolf’s To theLighthouse (1927), for example, Lily Briscoe suddenly perceives ahigher (or deeper) order in things as she watches the boat return. Herrealization is translated, directly and overtly, into aesthetic terms.Returning to her canvas, with intensity she draws the final line: ‘Itwas finished. Yes she thought laying down her brush in extremefatigue, I have had my vision’ (p. 320). A post-modern ‘line’ is morelikely to imitate that drawn by Tristram Shandy to represent the plotof his ‘life and times’ (resembling a diagram of the formation of an

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oxbow lake). In fact, if post-modernism shares some of thephilosophies of modernism, its formal techniques seem often tohave originated from novels like Tristram Shandy (1760), DonQuixote (1604) or Tom Jones (1749).

For Sterne, as for contemporary writers, the mind is not aperfect aestheticizing instrument. It is not free, and it is as muchconstructed out of, as constructed with, language. The substitutionof a purely metaphysical system (as in the case of Proust) ormythical analogy (as with Joyce and Eliot) cannot be accepted bythe metafictionist as final structures of authority and meaning.Contemporary reflexivity implies an awareness both of languageand metalanguage, of consciousness and writing.

B. S. Johnson’s ‘A Few Selected Sentences’, for example, isprecisely what its title suggests: a series of fragments taken from awide variety of discursive practices (ranging from a sixteenth-century description of the cacao fruit to absurd warnings) which,although resisting final totalization, can be arranged into a numberof conventional narratives. The most obvious of these is a commenton what we are doing as we read: constructing a detective story. Thestyle is reminiscent of Eliot’s technique of fragmentation andmontage in The Waste Land, but there the connections are presentdespite the fragmentary surface, to be recovered through the mythicconsciousness as the reader partakes in the modern equivalent of theGrail search. The fragments which Johnson has shored against hisruins are not at all explicable by any such a priori transcendentalsystem, only by his readers’ knowledge of the conventions ofstories. There is no longer a deep, structured collective unconsciousto be relied upon, only the heavily italicized and multi-coded ‘Life’with which the story ends (p. 80).

Whereas loss of order for the modernist led to the belief in itsrecovery at a deeper level of the mind, for metafictional writers themost fundamental assumption is that composing a novel is basicallyno different from composing or constructing one’s ‘reality’.Writing itself rather than consciousness becomes the main object ofattention. Questioning not only the notion of the novelist as God,through the flaunting of the author’s godlike role, but also theauthority of consciousness, of the mind, metafiction establishes thecategorization of the world through the arbitrary system of


language. The modernist writer whose style fits closest with thisessentially post-modernist mode of writing is, of course, JamesJoyce. Even in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), theepiphanic moments are usually connected with a self-reflexiveresponse to language itself. The word ‘foetus’, for example,scratched on a desk, forces upon Stephen’s consciousness arecognition of his whole ‘monstrous way of life’ (pp. 90–2).

Ulysses (1922) goes further in showing ‘reality’ to be aconsequence of ‘style’. However, despite parody, stylization andimitation of non-literary discourses, there is no overtly self-referential voice which systematically establishes, as the mainfocus of the novel, the problematic relationship of language and‘reality’. The only strictly metafictional line is Molly’s ‘Oh Jamesylet me up out of this Pooh’ (p. 691), though there are manyinherently self-conscious devices now widely used bymetafictional writers, and the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ section is, ofcourse, an extended piece of literary pastiche. Each of the parodiesof literary styles in this section presents a direct and problematicalrelationship between style and content which draws attention to thefact that language is not simply a set of empty forms filled withmeaning, but that it actually dictates and circumscribes what can besaid and therefore what can be perceived. When a discussion ofcontraception, for example, creeps into the parody of the languageof courtly love, the reader is made to see contraception in a newlight. The realities of procreation in the twentieth century arethrown into a different perspective through their discussion withinthe linguistic parameters of the medieval world.

Ulysses has eighteen chapters and eighteen main styles. B. S.Johnson’s Travelling People (1963), overtly both Shandyan andJoycean, has nine chapters and styles. Style is explicitly exploredhere in terms of negativity: how it represents certain aspects ofexperience only by excluding others. The novel begins byparodying the opening of Tom Jones, with Johnson setting out his‘bill of fare’ and explaining that the style of each chapter shouldspring from its subject matter. Each shift of style is furtheraccompanied by a Fieldingesque chapter heading, which, throughits equally vacuous generality in Johnson’s text, undermines theattempt of such verbal signposts to be comprehensive. The

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introduction, headings and ‘interludes’ complement the Joyceanstylistic shifts through which the characters, the rootless ‘travellingpeople’ of the contemporary world, attempt to construct identitiesfor themselves.

Henry, the protagonist, for example, is shown continuallystylizing his existence, distancing unpleasant realities such as howmany dogs are required to manufacture a certain amount of glue bycommunicating the information to himself in the language of astrident advertising slogan: ‘See that your pet has a happy home inHenry’s glue’ (p. 12). The reader is thus made aware of how realityis subjectively constructed. But beyond this essentially modernistperspective, the text reveals a post-modernist concern with how itis itself linguistically constructed. Through continuous narrativeintrusion, the reader is reminded that not only do characters verballyconstruct their own realities; they are themselves verbalconstructions, words not beings.

It might seem that in its (to quote Flann O’Brien) ‘self-evidentsham’ (At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), p.25) metafiction has merelyreduced the complex stylistic manœuvres of modernism to a set ofcrude statements about the relation of literary fictions to the realworld. The opening page of John Barth’s The Floating Opera(1956), for example, might appear in this light:

It has always seemed to me in the novels that I’ve read now andthen, that the authors are asking a great deal of their readerswho start their stories furiously in the middle of things, ratherthan backing or sliding slowly into them. Such a plunge intosomeone else’s life and world . . . has, it seems, little of pleasurein it. No, come along with me reader, and don’t fear for yourweak heart. Good heavens, how does one write a novel . . .

This seems a far cry from the plunge into the complex flow ofconsciousness characteristic of the opening of modernist novelssuch as Ulysses or To the Lighthouse. It is, in fact, much closer toSterne’s establishment of the novelist as conversationalist, asdependent on the reader for identity and sympathy. Thus Tristrambegs his reader, ‘bear with me – and let me go on and tell my storyin my own way’ (Tristram Shandy, p. 15). It also signals the


contemporary writer agonizing – like Sterne, like Tristram – overthe problem of beginnings but, unlike them, with a newsophisticated narrative awareness that a story never has a ‘real’beginning, can only ever begin arbitrarily, be recounted as plot. A‘story’ cannot exist without a teller. The apparent impersonality ofhistoire is always finally personal, finally discours.5

The themes of Barth’s novel in many ways resemble those ofmuch modernist fiction. Its central character Todd realizes thatexistence cannot finally be explained in the terms of logicalcausality. There is no original ‘source’ of one’s behaviour, whetherone draws on psychological, environmental or physical evidence.The attempt to trace such a source is, in fact, doomed in preciselythe way of Walter Shandy’s encyclopaedia. The incompletenesswhich permeates everything in Tristram’s account is here present,frustrating the modern concern to define reality in terms of a unifiedconsciousness, a whole self. Thus Todd’s modernist solipsism iscontinually undermined by the ironic and sometimes comic use ofvarious Shandyan devices. In its recognition that the limits of one’slanguage define the limits of one’s self, metafiction breaks intosolipsism by showing that the consciousness of Todd is here caughtin a net not of its own making but of that of the novelist and,ultimately, that of the very public medium of language.

As Sartre argued in Being and Nothingness (1956), acts ofconsciousness have to be conscious of themselves, so that evenwhen consciousness is focused on something else – when writing,for example – it must remain aware of itself on the edges ofconsciousness or the subject cannot continue to write. Modernismaimed at the impossible task of exploring pure consciousness.Metafiction has accepted Wittgenstein’s notion that ‘one thinks thatone is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over againand one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look atit’ (quoted in Josipovici 1977, p. 296).

Having differentiated briefly between the modes of literaryself-consciousness characteristic of modernist and post-modernistwriting, this chapter will now attempt to examine the concerns ofcontemporary metafiction in relation to some of the changes in theway in which reality is mediated and constructed by cultural theory

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and practice outside the strict domain of the ‘literary’. Literatureshould not be analysed as a form of expression which simply sets upits own traditions and conventions totally apart from those thatstructure non-literary culture. If metafiction is to be seen as apositive stage in the development of the novel, then its relevanceand sensitivity to the increasing and diverse manifestations of self-consciousness in the culture as a whole have to be established.

Two leading ideas in the field of sociology have been the notionof history/reality as a construct, and the idea of ‘framing’ as theactivity through which it is constructed. Psychologists, sociologistsand even economists have surely proved the tremendousimportance of the serious possibilities of ‘play’. Nevertheless itseems to be these aspects of metafictional writing that critics seizeon to accuse it of ephemerality and irrelevance. This chapter aimsto look at the ways in which metafictional techniques can be seen asa response to such non-literary cultural developments.

The analysis of frames: metafiction and frame-breaking

A frame may be defined as a ‘construction, constitution, build;established order, plan, system . . . underlying support or essentialsubstructure of anything’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Modernismand post-modernism begin with the view that both the historicalworld and works of art are organized and perceived through suchstructures or ‘frames’. Both recognize further that the distinctionbetween ‘framed’ and ‘unframed’ cannot in the end be made.Everything is framed, whether in life or in novels. Ortega y Gasset,writing on modernism, pointed out, however, that ‘not many peopleare capable of adjusting their perceptive apparatus to the pane andthe transparency that is the work of art. Instead they look rightthrough it and revel in the human reality with which the work deals’(Ortega y Gasset 1948, p. 31 ). Contemporary metafiction, inparticular, foregrounds ‘framing’ as a problem, examining frameprocedures in the construction of the real world and of novels. Thefirst problem it poses, of course, is: what is a ‘frame’? What is the‘frame’ that separates reality from ‘fiction’? Is it more than the frontand back covers of a book, the rising and lowering of a curtain, thetitle and ‘The End’?


Modernist texts begin by plunging in in medias res and endwith the sense that nothing is finished, that life flows on.Metafictional novels often begin with an explicit discussion of thearbitrary nature of beginnings, of boundaries, as in GrahamGreene’s The End of the Affair (1951): ‘A story has no beginning orend: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from whichto look back or from which to look ahead’ (p. 7). They often endwith a choice of endings. Or they may end with a sign of theimpossibility of endings. Julio Cortátzar’s Hopscotch (1967)presents the reader with two ‘books’: the book can be readaccording to the order in which it is printed, or it can be readaccording to an alternative order presented to the reader in the‘conclusion’, the apparent ‘end’ of the first order. The first ‘book’is read up to chapter 56; the second ‘book’ begins at chapter 73 andcovers the whole novel except for chapter 55. The final ‘end’ is nowapparently in chapter 58, but, when the reader gets there, it is todiscover that he or she should go back to chapter 131, and so on andon and on. The final chapter printed is chapter 155 (which directsthe reader back to 123), so the last printed words are: ‘Wait’ll I finishmy cigarette’ (Hopscotch, p. 564). We are still waiting . . .

Alternatively, such novels may end with a gloss upon thearchetypal fictional ending, the ‘happily ever after’. John Barth’sSabbatical (1982) poses the question whether the ending of theevents begins the writing, or the ending of the writing begins theevents. Susan decides that they should ‘begin it at the end and endat the beginning, so we can go on forever. Begin with our livinghappily ever after’ (p. 365); but her author has decided: ‘wecommence as we would conclude, that they lived

Happily ever after, to the end of Fenwick and Susie . . .’ (p. 366)

Contemporary metafiction draws attention to the fact that life, aswell as novels, is constructed through frames, and that it is finallyimpossible to know where one frame ends and another begins.Contemporary sociologists have argued along similar lines. ErvingGoffman in Frame Analysis has suggested that there is no simpledichotomy ‘reality/fiction’:

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When we decide that something is unreal, the real it isn’t neednot itself be very real, indeed, can just as well be adramatization of events as the events themselves – or arehearsal of the dramatization, or a painting of the rehearsal ora reproduction of the painting. Any of these latter can serve asthe original of which something is a mere mock-up, leadingone to think that which is sovereign is relationship – notsubstance.

(Goffman 1974, PP. 560–1)

Frames in life operate like conventions in novels: they facilitateaction and involvement in a situation. Goffman defines framesearly in his book:

I assume that definitions of a situation are built up inaccordance with principles which govern events – at leastsocial ones – and our subjective involvement in them; frame isthe word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I amable to identify.

(ibid., p. 67)

Analysis of frames is the analysis, in the above terms, of theorganization of experience. When applied to fiction it involvesanalysis of the formal conventional organization of novels. Whatboth Goffman and metafictional novels highlight through theforegrounding and analysis of framing activities is the extent towhich we have become aware that neither historical experiencesnor literary fictions are unmediated or unprocessed or non-linguistic or, as the modernists would have it, ‘fluid’ or ‘random’.Frames are essential in all fiction. They become more perceptible asone moves from realist to modernist modes and are explicitly laidbare in metafiction.

In metafictional novels, obvious framing devices range fromstories within stories (John Irving’s The World According to Garp(1976)), characters reading about their own fictional lives(Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller) and self-consumingworlds or mutually contradictory situations (Coover’s ‘TheBabysitter’, ‘The Magic Poker’ (1971)). The concept of ‘frame’includes Chinese-box structures which contest the reality of each


individual ‘box’ through a nesting of narrators (Flann O’Brien’s AtSwim-Two-Birds (1939), John Barth’s Chimera (1972)). Similar areso-called ‘fictions of infinity’ such as Borges’ ‘Library of Babel’,where ‘In order to locate Book B, first consult Book C and so on adinfinitum’ (Labyrinths, p. 84). Sometimes overt frames involve aconfusion of ontological levels through the incorporation ofvisions, dreams, hallucinatory states and pictorial representationswhich are finally indistinct from the apparently ‘real’ (AlainRobbe-Grillet’s Dans le labyrinthe (1959), Thomas Pynchon’sGravity’s Rainbow, Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor(1974) and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971)). Such infinitiesof texts within texts draw out the paradoxical relationship of‘framed’ and ‘unframed’ and, in effect, of ‘form’ and ‘content’.There is ultimately no distinction between ‘framed’ and‘unframed’. There are only levels of form. There is ultimately only‘content’ perhaps, but it will never be discovered in a ‘natural’unframed state.

One method of showing the function of literary conventions, ofrevealing their provisional nature, is to show what happens whenthey malfunction. Parody and inversion are two strategies whichoperate in this way as frame-breaks. The alternation of frame andframe-break (or the construction of an illusion through theimperceptibility of the frame and the shattering of illusion throughthe constant exposure of the frame) provides the essentialdeconstructive method of metafiction.

It seems that, according to Goffman, our sense of reality isstrong enough to cope with minor frame-breaks, and in fact theyreaffirm it, ensuring

the continuity and viability of the established frame. Indeed thedisattend track specifically permits the occurrence of manyout-of-frame acts, provided only that they are ‘properly’muted, that is, within the disattend capacity of the frame. . . .Thus collusive exchanges between friends at stylish gatheringscan be at once a means of breaking frame and a means ofstaying within it.

(Goffman 1974, p. 382)

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This comment is interesting because it offers support for an intuitivesense that although Fielding, Trollope and George Eliot, forexample, often ‘break the frame’ of their novels they are by nomeans self-conscious novelists in the sense in which the term hasbeen discussed here. Although the intrusive commentary ofnineteenth-century fiction may at times be metalingual (referring tofictional codes themselves), it functions mainly to aid the readerlyconcretization of the world of the book by forming a bridge betweenthe historical and the fictional worlds. It suggests that the one ismerely a continuation of the other, and it is thus not metafictional.

In Adam Bede (1859), for example, George Eliot destroys theillusion of Hayslope’s self-containedness by continually intrudingmoralistic commentary, interpretation and appeals to the reader.However, such intrusions do in fact reinforce the connectionbetween the real and the fictional world, reinforce the reader’s sensethat one is a continuation of the other. In metafictional texts suchintrusions expose the ontological distinctness of the real and thefictional world, expose the literary conventions that disguise thisdistinctness. In the chapter entitled ‘The Rector’, the narrativevoice intrudes: ‘Let me take you into their dining room . . . we willenter, very softly . . . the walls you see, are new. . . . He will perhapsturn round by and by and in the meantime we can look at that statelyold lady’ (p. 63). Eliot is here using the convention of the reader’spresence and the author’s limitations – a pretence that neitherknows what will happen next – to suggest through the collusiveinterchange that both are situated in ontologically undifferentiatedworlds. Although this is a frame-break, therefore, it is of the minorvariety which, in Goffman’s terms, reinforces the illusion.

In order to clarify the implications of the difference between aminor and a major frame-break, and their respective uses in realisticand metafictional novels, Adam Bede can be compared with ametafictional novel, set at roughly the same time and in many waysinvolving similar moral issues. John Fowles’s The FrenchLieutenant’s Woman uses the device of authorial intimacyultimately to destroy the illusion of reality. Throughout the fiction,real documents are referred to – as, for example, in the descriptionof Sarah unpacking at Exeter. The narrator meticulously describeseach article that she takes out:


and then a Toby Jug, not one of those greenish-colouredmonstrosities of Victorian manufacture, but a delicate littlething . . . (certain experts may recognize a Ralph Leigh) . . . thetoby was cracked and was to be recracked in the course of time,as I can testify, having bought it myself a year or two ago for agood deal more than the three pennies Sarah was charged. Butunlike her I fell for the Ralph Leigh part of it. She fell for thesmile.

(p. 241)

Sarah and the toby jug appear to have the same ontological status asthe narrator. This brings the reader up against the paradoxicalrealization that normally we can read novels only because of oursuspension of disbelief. Of course we know that what we are readingis not ‘real’, but we suppress the knowledge in order to increase ourenjoyment. We tend to read fiction as if it were history. By actuallyappearing to treat the fiction as a historical document, Fowlesemploys the convention against itself. The effect of this, instead ofreinforcing our sense of a continuous reality, is to split it open, toexpose the levels of illusion. We are forced to recall that our ‘real’world can never be the ‘real’ world of the novel. So the frame-break,while appearing to bridge the gap between fiction and reality, in factlays it bare.

Throughout The French Lieutenant’s Woman there is anabundance of frame-breaks more overt than this, particularly wherethe twentieth-century narrator suddenly appears as a character in thehistoire as well as in the discours. The effect is one which Goffmanhas again discussed: ‘When a character comments on a wholeepisode of activity in frame terms, he acquires a peculiar realitythrough the same words by which he undermines the one that wasjust performed’ (Goffman 1974, p. 400). When Fowles discusses thefact that ‘these characters I create never existed outside my ownmind’ (pp. 84–5), the peculiar reality forced upon the reader is thatthe character who is the apparent teller of the tale is its inventor andnot a recorder of events that happened (this becomes the entire themeof Raymond Federman’s novel Double or Nothing). Fowles goes onto argue, of course, that ‘Fiction is woven into all. . . . I find this newreality (or unreality) more valid’ (pp. 86–7).

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Despite this effect of exposure, however, it can be argued thatmetafictional novels simultaneously strengthen each reader’s senseof an everyday real world while problematizing his or her sense ofreality from a conceptual or philosophical point of view. As aconsequence of their metafictional undermining of theconventional basis of existence, the reader may revise his or herideas about the philosophical status of what is assumed to be reality,but he or she will presumably continue to believe and live in a worldfor the most part constructed out of ‘common sense’ and routine.What writers like Fowles are hoping is that each reader does thiswith a new awareness of how the meanings and values of that worldhave been constructed and how, therefore, they can be challengedor changed. To some extent each metafictional novel is a fictionalMythologies which, like Roland Barthes’s work, aims to unsettleour convictions about the relative status of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’. AsGoffman argues:

The study of how to uncover deceptions is also by and large thestudy of how to build up fabrications . . . one can learn howone’s sense of ordinary reality is produced by examiningsomething that is easier to become conscious of, namely, howreality is mimicked and/or how it is faked.

(Goffman 1974, P. 251)

Play, games and metafiction

All art is ‘play’ in its creation of other symbolic worlds; ‘fiction isprimarily an elaborate way of pretending, and pretending is afundamental element of play and games’ (Detweiler 1976, p. 51).Without necessarily accepting the Freudian notion that art andliterature act as compensatory forms of gratification replacing foran adult the lost childhood world of play and escapism, it can beargued not only that literary fiction is a form of play (if a verysophisticated form) but that play is an important and necessaryaspect of human society. It is clear that metafictional writers viewplay in this light – Ronald Sukenick, for example, in a story entitled‘The Death of the Novel’ (1969): ‘What we need is not great worksbut playful ones. . . . A story is a game someone has played so youcan play it too’ (pp. 56–7) – and it is clear that psychologists like L.


S. Vygotsky (1971), Jean Piaget (1951) and Gregory Bateson(1972) share this perception. However, it is also clear that critics ofmetafiction either disagree with psychologists’ and sociologists’view of play as educative and enlightening or disagree with thenotion of art as play. For metafiction sets out to make this explicit:that play is a relatively autonomous activity but has a definite valuein the real world. Play is facilitated by rules and roles, andmetafiction operates by exploring fictional rules to discover the roleof fictions in life. It aims to discover how we each ‘play’ our ownrealities.

The metacommentary provided by self-conscious fictioncarries the more or less explicit message: ‘this is make-believe’ or‘this is play’. The most important feature shared by fiction and playis the construction of an alternative reality by manipulating therelation between a set of signs (whether linguistic or non-linguistic)as ‘message’ and the context or frame of that message. As Batesonargues in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, the same behaviour can be‘framed’ by a shift in context which then requires very differentinterpretative procedures. The same set of actions performed in a‘play’ context will not denote what they signify in a non-playcontext. Roland Barthes demonstrates this very entertainingly inhis analysis of wrestling in Mythologies. The sport is praised for its‘semiotic’ as opposed to ‘mimetic’ construction of meaning, itsflaunting of its status as play. The spectators are never deluded intobelieving that a ‘real’ fight is taking place; they are kept constantlyaware that it is a spectacle:

only an image is involved in the game, and the spectator doesnot wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he onlyenjoys the perfection of an iconography. It is not true thatwrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligiblespectacle.

(Barthes 1972b, p. 20)

Literary fiction, as a form of play, shifts signification in thesame way. In fact the shift of context is greater because fiction isconstructed with language and language is characterized preciselyby its detachability from specific context. Language does not haveto refer to objects and situations immediately present at the act of

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utterance; it does not have to be directly indexical. A phrase utteredin a real-life context and referring to objects actually present can betransferred to many different contexts: everyday, literary,journalistic, philosophical, scientific. The actual relationship of thesigns within the phrase will remain the same, but, because theirrelationship to signs outside themselves has shifted, the meaning ofthe phrase will also shift. Thus the language of fiction may appearto imitate the languages of the everyday world, but its ‘meaning’will necessarily be different. However, all play and fiction require‘meta’ levels which explain the transition from one context toanother and set up a hierarchy of contexts and meanings. Inmetafiction this level is foregrounded to a considerable extentbecause the main concern of metafiction is precisely theimplications of the shift from the context of ‘reality’ to that of‘fiction’ and the complicated interpenetration of the two.

Bateson saw play as a means of discovering newcommunicative possibilities, since the ‘meta’ level necessary forplay allows human beings to discover how they can manipulatebehaviour and contexts. The subsequent discovery of new methodsof communication allows for adaptation, which he sees as ensuringhuman survival. Fictional play also re-evaluates the traditionalprocedures of communication and allows release from establishedpatterns. Metafiction explicitly examines the relation of theseprocedures within the novel to procedures outside it, ensuring thesurvival through adaptability of the novel itself.

Metafiction draws attention to the process ofrecontextualization that occurs when language is used aesthetically– when language is, in the sense described above, used ‘playfully’.Most psychologists of play emphasize this release from everydaycontexts. They argue that ‘a certain degree of choice, lack ofconstraint from conventional ways of handling objects, materialsand ideas, is inherent in the concept of play. This is its mainconnexion with art’ (Millar 1968, p. 21). When such a shift ofcontext occurs, though, the more dislocatory it is (say, from theeveryday to literary fantasy rather than to literary realism), the morethe shift itself acts implicitly as a metacommenting frame. Withoutexplicit metacommentary, however, the process of


recontextualization is unlikely to be fully understood, and this mayresult in an unintentional confusion of planes or orders of reality.

This was demonstrated very clearly in fact by Jakobson’s workon speech disturbances or aphasia (Jakobson 1956). In whatJakobson referred to as ‘similarity disorder’, the aphasic personsuffers from an incapacity to ‘name’ objects (an incapacity tomanipulate language through the activity of substitution) and atendency to rely on metonymy. In this disorder, the aphasic cannotuse words unless the objects to which the words refer areimmediately present. Language thus loses its central characteristicof detachability from context. The more dependent the message onthe immediate context, therefore, the more likely is the aphasic tounderstand it. Jakobson suggests that this disorder is ‘properly aloss of metalanguage’ (ibid., p. 67). Although linguistic messagescan operate outside their immediate referential contexts,metalanguage (reference to the codes of language themselves) isneeded for this to be successful. The more ‘playful’ a literary work(the more, for example, it shifts from everyday to alternative-worldcontexts), the more such metalanguages are needed if therelationship between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictive’ world is to bemaintained and understood. In metafictional novels it is the natureof this relationship which is the subject of enquiry. Metalingualcommentary is thus fore-grounded as the vehicle of that enquiry.

In some novels, contexts shift so continuously andunsystematically that the metalingual commentary is not adequateto ‘place’ or to interpret such shifts. The reader is deliberatelydisoriented (as in the novels of William Burroughs, for example).Alternatively, some contemporary novels are constructed withextreme shifts of context or frame (from realism to fantasy, forinstance), but without any explanatory metalingual commentary tofacilitate the transition from one to the other. The reader is thusneither offered a rational explanation for the shift nor provided withany means of relating one context to another.

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years ofSolitude (1967) achieves its bizarre effects through this type ofshift. Ostensibly realistically portrayed characters suddenly beginto act in fantastic ways. Characters die and come back to life, a man

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is turned into a snake ‘for having disobeyed his parents’ (p. 33).Similarly, in Leonard Michaels’s ‘Mildred’ (1964) a tenseconversation is interrupted by one of the characters literally startingto eat the womb of one of the others, and finally the narrator startsto eat his face. Michaels gives no indication that this surrealistdislocation may be based on a confusion of the metaphorical‘eating one’s heart out’ (based on context detachability) with itsliteral meaning when returned to context. In other words, hedeliberately uses ‘similarity disorder’ in reverse. The effect in bothof these examples is close to that of a schizophrenic construction ofreality (as Bateson sees it), where information is not processed,where metalingual insufficiency results in a failure to distinguishbetween hierarchies of messages and contexts. Here the historicalworld and the alternative or fantasy world merge. In metafictionthey are always held in a state of tension, and the relationshipbetween them – between ‘play’ and ‘reality’ – is the main focus ofthe text.

It is therefore play as a rule-governed activity, one involving‘assimilation of’ and ‘accommodation to’ (Piaget’s terms) thestructures of the everyday world, as much as play as a form ofescapism, of release from ‘having to mean’, which interestsmetafictional writers. As Gina Politi has argued:

There is some truth in the historical fact that whenever man hasto be defined as man equals child, the edenic period wherebyhe can live without structures is short-lived and another gameis invented which brings in the law-maker who declares whatgames are and what they are not.

(Politi 1976, p. 60)

Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) achieved the success it didbecause of its accurate perception of this point.

Another fictional response to the sense of oppression by theendless systems and structures of present-day society – with itstechnologies, bureaucracies, ideologies, institutions and traditions– is the construction of a play world which consists of similarendless systems and structures. Thomas Pynchon and Joseph


McElroy both construct novels whose vast proliferation of counter-systems and counter-games suggests one way of eluding theapparent predetermination of the structures of the everyday world.Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge(1974) function through informational overload and apparentoverdetermination. However, the systems and structures presentedto the reader never add up to a body of meaning or an interpretation.Documentation, obsessional systems, the languages of commerce,of the legal system, of popular culture, of advertising: hundreds ofsystems compete with each other, collectively resistingassimilation to any one received paradigm and thus the normalchannels of data-processing.

In McElroy’s A Smuggler’s Bible (1966) the central motif ofsmuggling, of counterfeiting, of forging, of deceiving, set againstthe ‘absolute truth’, the concordance of origins and endings of theBible, is explored as much through what the language is as what itsays. The central character David Brooke, like Borges’ mnemonist,suffers from total recall of information and breaks down. The novelalso breaks down. Neither Brooke nor the novel can absorb andorganize the numerous and contradictory codes and registers oflanguage with which they are both confronted and constructed.Mythical, biblical, numerical, geographical, physical andmetaphysical explanations break down into a totaloverdetermination of meaning, which therefore becomesmeaningless.

The image of the smuggler’s bible is in fact just one of the manyexamples in recent literature of versions of the ‘black box’,contemporary culture’s answer to the Grail. The image appearsexplicitly in another story concerned with human attempts to resisttechnological and social determinism: Barthelme’s ‘TheExplanation’, in the collection entitled City Life (1970). The storyis a parody of an interview between an anonymous Q and A aboutthe identity and meaning of a black box which is typographicallyreproduced at the beginning of the story. At one level the story is

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simply and directly metafictional: it is ‘about’ the non-interpretability of itself:

(p. 72)

Halfway through, Q introduces a series of ‘error messages’,corrections by a computer of uninterpretable programs, which inthis instance all refer to the story itself, in a ‘computerized’ literary-critical discourse:

undefined variable . . . improper sequence of operators . . .improper use of hierarchy . . . missing operator . . . mixed mode,that one’s particularly grave . . . argument of a function is fixed-point . . . improper character in constant . . . invalid charactertransmitted in sub-program statement, that’s a bitch . . . no ENDstatement

(P. 73)

Later, Q tells the reader: ‘The issues are not real in the sense that theyare touchable.’ A (the reader substitute within the story), however,still manages to process the message, sees in the black box a face,an extraordinarily handsome girl stripping, a river, a chair, a humannarrative, or at least the raw materials of one. Barthelme’s storydramatizes the human propensity to construct its own systems andinterpretations in order to resist technological determinism anddehumanization. If the machine operates in terms of its owncybernetic game theory, Barthelme shows that his fiction canoperate through simply recontextualizing its messages within hisown ‘play’ world.

Such fiction, however, moves towards a form of play whichone theorist has termed the ‘illinx’: an entropic, self-annihilating

Q: It has beauties A: The machine Q: Yes. We construct these machines not because we confi-

dently expect them to do what they are designed to do –change the government in this instance – but because weintuit a machine out there, glowing like a shopping cen-tre.


form which represents an attempt to ‘momentarily destroy thestability of perceptions and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic uponan otherwise lucid mind . . . a kind of seizure or shock whichdestroys reality with sovereign brusqueness’ (Caillois 1962, p. 25).Fictions of aleation or randomness can be placed in this category.Metafiction functions through the problematization rather than thedestruction of the concept of ‘reality’. It depends on the regularconstruction and subversion of rules and systems. Such novelsusually set up an internally consistent ‘play’ world which ensuresthe reader’s absorption, and then lays bare its rules in order toinvestigate the relation of ‘fiction’ to ‘reality’, the concept of‘pretence’.

Two theories of play will briefly be considered here: that ofJohan Huizinga in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element inCulture (1949) and that of Roger Caillois in Man, Play and Games(1962). Huizinga defines play as a free activity which ‘transpires inan explicitly circumscribed time and space, is carried out in anorderly fashion according to given rules and gives rise to grouprelations which often surround themselves with mystery oremphasize through disguises their difference from the ordinaryworld’ (Huizinga 1949, pp. 34–5). This accords with the notion of‘play’ implicit in most metafictional novels.

There is a central contradiction in both Huizinga’s andCaillois’s definition of play, however, which is precisely wheremetafictional interest is focused. They appear to argue that the mainsignificance of play is its civilizing influence, but Huizingaexplicitly states at one point that he sees civilization becoming lessand less playful. Yet elsewhere he argues that he sees ‘man’ asbecoming more and more civilized. The way out of this problem(and the perspective asserted by most metafictional writing) isimplicit in the second part of Caillois’s book where he argues that itis precisely an awareness of play as play which constitutes thecivilizing, as opposed to the brutally instinctual, possibilities ofplay. The positive emphasis thus shifts to the laying bare of the rulesof the game. ‘Illinx’ becomes associated with attempts at puremimesis and is seen to result in alienation. The player loses him orherself in a fantasy world and actually becomes the role beingplayed (a favourite metafictional theme – as, for example, in Muriel

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Spark’s The Public Image (1968)) or attempts to impose it on othersas ‘reality’. In literature, then, realism, more than aleatory art,becomes the mode most threatening to full civilization, andmetafiction becomes the mode most conducive to it!

The current ‘playfulness’ within the novel is certainly notconfined merely to literary form but is part of a broaderdevelopment in culture which is registered acutely in all post-modernist art. As Michael Beaujour suggests:

The desire to play a game in reverse usually arises when thestraight way of playing has become a bore . . . the rules of thegame, which although arbitrary, had somehow become‘natural’ to the players, now seem artificial, tyrannical anddead: the system does not allow for sufficient player freedomwithin it and must be discarded. Although only a system canreplace a system, the interregnum may be experienced as totalfreedom. In fact, it is but the moment of a new deal.

(Beaujour 1968, p. 60)

Freedom is the moment when the game or the genre is beingdiscarded, but the rules of the new one are not yet defined and aretherefore experienced as the ‘waning of former rules’ (ibid.).Metafiction is in the position of examining the old rules in order todiscover new possibilities of the game. In its awareness of theserious possibility of play, it in fact echoes some of the majorconcerns of twentieth-century thought: Piaget’s work on theeducational value of play; Wittgenstein’s view of language as a setof games; the existential notion of reality as a game of being; thepossibility of the endless play of language through the release of thesignifier in post-structuralist theory such as that of Lacan or Derridaand, of course, the proliferation of popular psychology books suchas Eric Berne’s Games People Play. Even in the commercial world,game theory is an increasingly important aspect of systemsanalysis. A new emphasis on the importance of discovering freshcombinations in probability and risk is shown in the application ofgame theory, for example, to economic or political problems.

Some metafictional novelists make the reader explicitly awareof his or her role as player. The reader of The French Lieutenant’s


Woman, having to choose an ending, becomes a player in the game,one very much modelled on the Heideggerian game of being. In thetitle story of B. S. Johnson’s Aren’t You Rather Young to be WritingYour Memoirs (1973), an adventure story in which nothinghappens, the reader is told to ‘provide your own surmises or evenyour own ending, as you are inclined’ (p. 41). Barthelme andFederman present the reader with acrostics, puzzles to be solved,and black boxes or blank pages to interpret, according to thereader’s own fictional predilections. Calvino’s novel, If on aWinter’s Night a Traveller, addresses the reader in the second personand explicitly discusses the supremacy of his or her activity inrealizing the text imaginatively. The ‘Dear Reader’ is no longerquite so passive and becomes in effect an acknowledged fully activeplayer in a new conception of literature as a collective creationrather than a monologic and authoritative version of history.

All metafiction ‘plays’ with the form of the novel, but not allplayfulness in fiction is of the metafictional variety. Metafictionvery deliberately undermines a system, unlike, say, aleatory orDadaist art which attempts to embrace randomness or ‘illinx’. In anovel like Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, there isplayfulness but none of the systematic flaunting characteristic ofmetafiction. (The effect is perhaps closer to that of Márquez’sfictions, where fantastic events and situations are integrated into abasically realistic context with no narratorial hint of theirimpossibility or absurdity.) Only a common deployment of the titlelinks the separate sections of the novel. It is metafictional only to theextent that it foregrounds the arbitrary relationship between wordsand things and lays bare the construction of meaning throughmetaphorical substitution. For the most part, it is fabulatorybecause the reader is never required systematically to connect theartifice of the narrative with the problematic ‘real’ world, or toexplore the mode of fictional presentation.

Another sort of fiction is that built around the idea or rules of anactual game, as in Coover’s ‘Panel Game’ (1971) or The UniversalBaseball Association, Inc. (1968) and Nabokov’s The Defence(1964). The latter, for example, is close to metafiction in that thegame of chess, traditionally a metaphor for life, is used here as ametaphor for the strategies of art. Luzhin is one of Nabokov’s

44 Metafiction

familiar artist manqué figures, playing blind games of chess in orderto achieve abstract perfection until the ‘consecutive repetition of afamiliar pattern’ (p. 168) becomes an invincible opponent takingover his life. In a state of paranoia similar to Woolf’s SeptimusSmith, he throws himself out of the window and dies in what hischess-obsessed mind has taken to be a real-life game. The novelsuggests that each person is to some extent the victim of his or herown games with reality, but that the mistake is to search for a perfectform of order.

The ‘problem of the equality of appearance and numbers’(Pricksongs and Descants, p. 8) – that is, of play with combinationand permutation – is a favourite device in metafiction. Writersemploying such techniques, through a heightened sense of therandomness of the world, have come to see its configuration, inwhatever mathematical or other combination they choose, as just ascorrespondent with reality as the paradigms of realism. ItaloCalvino suggests that the combinative impulse has been basic toliterature from the beginning; that in ancient times ‘the storytellerwould delve into the natural resources of his own stock of words. Hedid this by combinations and permutations of all the characters,activities and tangible objects which could be invoked in therepertoire of actions’ (Calvino 1970, p. 93). He suggests that thisforms a kind of generative grammar of narrative which makesrenewal possible. Combinative play in metafiction is concernedwith the self-consciously performed reintroduction into the literarysystem of previously outworn modes and the exposure of presentexhausted forms often unrecognized as such. Further, the elementof chance in combination may throw up a whole new possibilitywhich rational exploration might not have discovered.

Samuel Beckett begins with the perception that habit androutine form the substructure of most individual existences. Hetherefore uses both as the starting point for his fiction and pushesthem to a logical extreme which reveals not only their absurdity butalso their necessity in a world that has no innate structure of its own.Malone tells himself stories that are made to correspond, throughhis own conceptualizations, with the apparent structure of his life,which itself turns out to be only the story he narrates. He providesvariety in this life by means of the slightly shifting repetitions that


he consciously forces upon the narrative process. Malone Dies(1951) has to be understood in these terms, for the patterns Malonesets up seem to bear not even an analogous relationship to themeaning of the world outside him.

In Watt (1953) the protagonist totally replaces the world withhis verbal constructs when he realizes the impossibility oftranscribing it. In attempting to grasp the meaning of phenomena,he enumerates every possible combination and permutation he canthink of for each set of circumstances, in an attempt to construct asystem which will offer him a stable identity. However, as Mr Nixontells Mr Hackett, ‘I tell you nothing is known. Nothing’ (p. 20). Thehuman mind is a fallible instrument of measurement and theexternal world a chaos. Knowledge derived from humancalculation or generalization can only demonstrate theepistemological distance between consciousness and objectivereality, however exhaustive the account. The Lynch family,attempting to total one thousand years of age between them, havetheir calculations completely undermined by the textual superiorityof the footnote informing the reader: ‘The figures given here areincorrect. The consequent calculations are . . . doubly erroneous’ (p.101). Even if the figures were not in some epistemological doubt,the reader’s attention has anyway been called to the ontologicalstatus of the fictional text. Watt’s life is full of similarly fruitlesscalculations, like the half-page of combinations of ‘man’ and‘woman’ in the attempt to settle the question of whether MrsGorman is a ‘Man’s woman’ and whether she and Watt willtherefore suit each other. The passage begins with an oscillationbetween polarities – of gender, of rhymes (the arbitrary sound-relations in language such as ‘Watt’ and ‘not’), of terms like ‘call’and ‘countercall’ – but this simple binary opposition is abandoned,to end with: ‘that meant nothing’ (p. 141) (not even the binaryopposition of all or nothing but the identity of all with nothing).

The problem is that to cover the infinite number of possiblesituations that can arise from a finite number of experiences wouldinvolve the use of infinite numbers of words and repetitions.Beckett’s attempt to show this makes the text become rather like anofficial form which asks one to delete the irrelevant information.The contradiction between, on the one hand, an abstract

46 Metafiction

methodology which constructs a ‘system’ and, on the other, theapparent concrete illogical ‘reality’ of experience in the world(which Realism chooses to treat as one and the same) is, in fact,irreconcilable. So Watt constructs his own system of ‘Kriks’ and‘Kraks’. Instead of trying to force correspondence between hissystem and the world, he simply ignores the world.

Many of Beckett’s characters spend their fictional lives invarious forms of serious play, attempting to come to terms with thisproblem. Combination is foregrounded even on a stylistic level, asin Waiting for Godot (1956): ‘Let us not then speak ill of ourgeneration. . . . Let us not speak well of it either. . . . Let us not speakof it at all. . . . It is true the population has increased’ (p. 33). Thisspiralling sentence structure is very common in much of his work.So is the use of contradiction, as in the end of ‘Dante and theLobster’ (More Pricks than Kicks, 1934): ‘Well, thought Belacqua,it’s a quick death, God help us all. It is not’ (p. 19), which functionsin a way and with effects similar to the footnote in Watt.

In Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) the second sentence,‘Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished,endlessly omit’, suggests that poetic descriptions are no longervalid, and substitutes the mathematical: ‘Diameter three feet, threefeet from ground. . . . Two diameters at right angles AB CD dividethe white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA.’ The humansubject is suddenly inserted into the geometry problem – ‘the headagainst the wall at B, the arse against the wall at A, the knees againstthe wall between B and C’ – and the text breaks down into a seriesof oppositions: white/black, human/mathematical, light/dark, heat/ice, in a sequence again of colliding combinations which reduce thisworld to variations on the alignments of ABCD (pp. 7–14).

Calvino’s fiction also uses these strategies of combination. InThe Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969) a footnote tells the readerthat the ‘author’ (who is effectively made redundant by theinformation) generated the text in the manner reproduced in fact bythe narrative situation: a group of characters who are mute tell theirstories by selecting and combining the images from a pack of tarotcards. These combinations and selections, drawing from a totalsystem of literature (a langue), produce individual utterances(paroles) or stories which have meaning only through their


differential relation with implied archetypal stories recurringthroughout: Oedipus, the Grail legend, Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth. Thecontemporary ‘author’, now the contemporary categorizer, ishimself produced through the textual combinations. He believesthat to write a ‘great work’ of literature simply involves theprovision of a reference catalogue of existing ‘great works’, anultimate intertextual key. The possibilities of ‘literature as system’begin to obsess him, until he realizes: ‘It was absurd to waste anymore time on an operation whose implicit possibilities I had by nowexplored completely, an operation that made sense only astheoretical hypothesis’ (p. 120).

Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller discovers a moreeffective way out of this endlessly permutating system: the use ofovertly metafictional, and in particular parodistic, devices. Thenovel opens with a direct address to the reader in the situation ofreading, and a metalingual discourse upon the construction of theplot and the relation of histoire to discours. This confuses theontological levels of the text with descriptions like: ‘The novelbegins in a railway station . . . a cloud of smoke hides the first partof the paragraph’ (p. 8). Here the situation of narration is confusedwith the situation of the histoire, reminding the reader thatdescriptions in novels are always creations of that which is to bedescribed: that the language in this sense refers ultimately to itself.Throughout we are reminded of the status of the book as an artefactthrough references to missing pages, pages stuck together,disordered pages. We are reminded also of its intertextual existencethrough the fragments of novels, stories and narratives embeddedwithin the outer frame. (Again this is a very common metafictionaldevice, used extensively, for example, by Flann O’Brien, B. S.Johnson, John Irving and Donald Barthelme.) Both Beckett andCalvino metafictionally ‘play’ with possibilities of combination,but through techniques like irony provide themselves with escaperoutes from the endless permutations of systems which mightcontinually change their surface forms but which retain theirinherent structures. Other novelists may choose to impose extremeformal constraints on themselves, which, in their arbitrariness,metafictionally reflect back on the conventional contracts whichlegitimize ‘meaning’. Two examples of this literary production in a

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very closed field are Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa (1974) andGilbert Sorrentino’s Splendide-Hotel (1973).

Alphabetical Africa works on the principle that every sentencein the first chapter is composed only of words beginning with ‘A’.Chapter 2 adds ‘B’ words, and so on. The linguistic structuredictates both formal effects and meaning. The narrator, forexample, cannot be introduced as a person until ‘I’. He literallyawaits creation through language. Alliteration cannot functionbecause, instead of being a technique of linguistic deviance and thusforegrounded, it is the stylistic norm until well into the novel. Eventhe story and the development of the plot are determined by whatcan be constructed out of the available linguistic elements. At ‘M’,therefore, a murder can occur which could change the whole courseof the action. At ‘O’ the reader is told: ‘One is always either movingforwards or backwards, one is always driven by insane butmeticulously considered needs.’ Thus even the historic ‘one’, thenon-person existing outside the discourse, is ultimately constructedthrough it (explicitly, therefore, through an arbitrary order and setof distinctions).

A similar example of what Abish has referred to as language asa ‘field of action’ is Sorrentino’s Splendide-Hotel. Here, however,the letters of the alphabet merely serve to trigger off verbal musings.The Splendide-Hotel, though never defined, is clearly the verbalimagination itself, seen as intrinsically playful rather thanintrinsically aesthetic. The narrator intrudes with the informationthat ‘I insist I do not speak of this game as art, yet it is close to art inthat it is so narrowly itself: it does not stand for anything else’ (p.14). He thus offers a view of literature similar to that formulated byRoman Jakobson: the view that literature is a message for its ownsake, or a message about itself (Jakobson 1960). However, bothAbish and Sorrentino, in their self-contained linguistic play, tend topoint the direction from metafiction to a ‘literature of silence’, or apure formalism, a literature solely concerned with its own linguisticprocesses.


The linguistic universe: reality as construct

Frame analysis and play theory are areas of contemporary socialinvestigation which illumine the practice of metafiction and showthe sensitivity of its reponse to cultural change. They are each,however, aspects of a broader shift in thought and practice wherebyreality has increasingly come to be seen as a construct. Hegel, infact, suggested that history be contemplated as a work of art, for inretrospect it ‘reads’ like a novel: its end is known. Metafictionsuggests not only that writing history is a fictional act, rangingevents conceptually through language to form a world-model, butthat history itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating plotswhich appear to interact independently of human design.

This is the theme of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man(1975). Like much British self-conscious fiction, however, thenovel manages to suggest the fictionality of ‘reality’ withoutentirely abandoning realism. The only blatantly metafictionalmoment is when an academic novelist, clearly recognizable as asurrogate for Bradbury himself, scurries across the corridor ofWatermouth University where the novel is set. (He is, interestingly,presented as a very minor and ineffectual character.) A closeanalysis of The History Man, though, reveals an intensepreoccupation, formally as well as thematically, with the notion ofhistory as fiction. Even the opening paragraph is less a piece ofrealistic prose than a parody of realism. The continual use ofdeliberately well-worn phrases about the Kirks (Howard’s ‘twowell-known and disturbing books’; p. 3); the antithetical structuresand parallelisms (‘You buy the drinks, I’ll buy the food’; p. 8); thejuxtaposition of normally unrelated items such as ‘a new kind ofViennese coffee cake to eat and a petition to sign’ (p. 3): thesefunction not only to parody the Kirks’ lifestyle but to foreground theways in which that lifestyle is also a consequence of Bradbury’sobtrusive linguistic style.

The Kirks are explicitly ‘types’ who exist in the service of plot:the plot of history/fiction which envelops the plotter Howardthrough the superior shaping powers of the novelist himself. He,allowing Howard the delusion of freedom, reminds the reader of hisultimate control through the ironic repetition of events at the end.

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The significance of these events Howard, of course, fails to grasp,trapped as he is both in his own ‘lifestyle’ and in Bradbury’s‘fictional style’. Howard acts as though he were the embodiment ofhistory and thus in control of both his own and others’ destinies.Although ‘the days may lie contingently ahead of them . . . the Kirksalways have a plot of many events’ (p. 52). Howard confuses hisown plots, however, with those of history – here constructedthrough language by Bradbury himself. It is Miss Callendar (whosename suggests time as contingency, as escape from plot) who pointsout the multiple possibilities of interpretation, the numerous plotsthat can be drawn out of, or imposed on, any historical or fictionalsituation. It is she who exposes Howard’s plot as ‘a piece of latenineteenth-century realism’ (p. 209).

The notion of the fictionality of the plots of history is textuallyreinforced through a variety of techniques. The dialogue, forexample, is submerged in the main narrative to suggest the ways inwhich our individual interpretations are always parts of larger ones.This foregrounds the provisional status within the overall discoursof any character’s or narrator’s speech act. The reader is taken intothe dynamic present tense of Howard’s plots, yet reminded ofFreud’s law of displacement – that it is impossible to see the worldother than as we wish it to be – by the ostentatious entries of thegreater plot-maker, the novelist, into the text. He functions to setfictional desire against fictional reality and to show how one istranslated into the other.

To some extent the idea that life involves the construction ofplots has always been a preoccupation of the novel. Richard Poirier,in fact, has suggested that Americans have always treated reality astheir own construction; they have always realized that ‘throughlanguage it is possible to create environments radically differentfrom those supported by political and social systems’ (Poirier 1967,p. 16). Thus the notion of history as either a rather badly made plotor a fiendish conspiracy is more deeply rooted in the American thanin the British novel.

A comparison of the exploration of plots in John Barth’s TheSot-Weed Factor (1960) with that undertaken by Bradbury in TheHistory Man illustrates very well such differences between thesetwo fictional traditions. The characters in both novels self-


consciously participate in plots, whether of their own or others’making. In Barth’s novel, however, all the characters are self-consciously plotters. Ebenezer argues that what the cosmos lackshuman beings must supply themselves, and Burlingame givesphilosophic respectability to the notion of plotting, while using itlike Howard to gain personal advantages. However, in this world,because the plots are so much more anonymous, proliferating anduncontrollable, the characters’ behaviour appears far moredesperate and absurd than Howard’s self-assured exploitation ofMarx, Freud, Hegel and undergraduate innocence. Even Barth’sdemonstration of his authorial control through the overplot of themythic quest is continually and ironically undercut to give thesense, as Burlingame expresses it, that ‘the very universe is noughtbut change and motion’ (p. 137).

The consequence of this, though, is that, in attempting toembrace all, his characters embrace nothing but the ‘baroqueexhaustion of the frightening guises of reality’ (Barth 1967, p. 81).In the novel as a whole, moreover, the metafictional bones are oftenleft obtruding from a very thin human covering. The reader ispresented, in fact, with a fictional world in many ways akin toBorges’ Tlön, where history lessons teach that ‘already a fictitiouspast occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of whichwe know nothing with certainty – not even that it is false’(Labyrinths, pp. 42–3). In The History Man the stable ironic voiceof the author ensures that the reader can observe and evaluateHoward’s version of the past and his imposition of various imagesand plots upon the present. But in The Sot-Weed Factor there is nosuch area of narrative stability. Plot is all.

The concept of reality as a fiction has been theoreticallyformulated within many disciplines and from many political andphilosophical positions. One of the clearest sociologicalexpositions is in Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s book,The Social Construction of Reality (1971). They set out to show that‘reality’ is not something that is simply given. ‘Reality’ ismanufactured. It is produced by the interrelationship of apparently‘objective facticities’ in the world with social convention andpersonal or interpersonal vision. These social forms operate withinparticular historical structures of power and frameworks of

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knowledge. Continual shifts in the structures of knowledge andpower produce continual resyntheses of the reality model.Contemporary reality, in particular, is continually beingreappraised and resynthesized. It is no longer experienced as anordered and fixed hierarchy, but as a web of interrelating, multiplerealities.

Moving through this reality involves moving from one‘reality’ to another. Most of the time, however, we are not consciousof these shifts. Habit, instrumented through social institutions andconventions, normally disguises movement between levels, andconfers an apparent homogeneity upon social experience. It is onlywhen a convention is exposed as such that the lacunae betweenlevels are also exposed.

Berger and Luckmann suggest that convention and habit arenecessary because human beings need to have their choicesnarrowed for significant action to take place. Habit ensures thatpatterns can be repeated in such a way that the meaning of an actionis not retained at the level of consciousness. If this were not so, theaction could not be effortlessly performed. (This is also, of course,the basis for realistic fiction. When the conventions regardingfictive time, for example, are undermined in Tristram Shandy, thenovel never gets under way as an histoire but functions only as aself-regarding discours which never quite manages to get the storytold.) Habitualization provides for direction and specialization, byfreeing our energies for more productive ends. It opens up a‘foreground for deliberation and innovation’ (Berger andLuckmann 1971, p. 71). Conventions can, however, becomeoppressive and rigidified, completely naturalized. At this point theyneed to be re-examined, both in life and in fiction.

Everyday reality is, however, for Berger and Luckmann,‘reality par excellence’. It imposes itself massively onconsciousness so that, although we may doubt its reality, ‘I amobliged to suspend this doubt as I routinely exist in everyday life’(ibid., pp. 35–7). Problems that interrupt this flow are seen to betranslated into its terms and assimilated: ‘Consciousness alwaysreturns to the paramount reality as from an excursion’ (ibid., p. 58).According to this view, the ‘meta’ levels of fictional and social


discourse might shift our notion of reality slightly but can nevertotally undermine it.

Berger and Luckmann argue further, however, that language isthe main instrument for maintaining this everyday reality:‘Everyday life is above all, life with and by means of the language Ishare with my fellow men [sic!] (ibid., pp. 39–40). Thus texts whichmove towards a breakdown of the language system, presentingreality as a set of equally non-privileged competing discourses, canbe seen as resisting assimilation into the terms of the everyday. Theyattempt, in fact, radically to unsettle our notion of the ‘real’. (DorisLessing’s protagonist Anna, for example, in The Golden Notebook,loses her precarious hold on this ‘everyday life’ when she feels ‘ata pitch where words mean nothing’ (p. 462), because in this novel‘reality par excellence’ is represented by the misrepresentational,inauthentic language of ‘Free Women’ which freezes the everyday– ‘British life at its roots’ – into a mocking parody of itself.)

What has to be acknowledged is that there are two poles ofmetafiction: one that finally accepts a substantial real world whosesignificance is not entirely composed of relationships withinlanguage; and one that suggests there can never be an escape fromthe prisonhouse of language and either delights or despairs in this.The first sort employs structural undermining of convention, orparody, using a specific previous text or system for its base(novelists like Fowles, Spark, Vonnegut, Lessing) becauselanguage is so pre-eminently the instrument which maintains theeveryday. The second is represented by those writers who conducttheir fictional experiments even at the level of the sign (likeBarthelme, Brautigan, Ishmael Reed, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) andtherefore fundamentally disturb the ‘everyday’.

Berger and Luckmann do not, in fact, give enough attention tothe centrality of language in constructing everyday reality. It is thisexposure of ‘reality’ in terms of ‘textuality’, for example, which hasprovided the main critique of realism. As Barthes argued:

These facts of language were not perceptible so long asliterature pretended to be a transparent expression of eitherobjective calendar time or of psychological subjectivity . . . aslong as literature maintained a totalitarian ideology of the

54 Metafiction

referent, or more commonly speaking, as long as literature was‘realistic’.

(Barthes 1972c, p. 138)

By ‘these facts’, of course, he means the extent to which languageconstructs rather than merely reflects everyday life: the extent towhich meaning resides in the relations between signs within aliterary fictional text, rather than in their reference to objects outsidethat text.

Metafictional texts often take as a theme the frustration causedby attempting to relate their linguistic condition to the worldoutside. Coover’s ‘Panel Game’ (1969) parodies the attempt to findan all-encompassing truth in language, by showing the narratorcaught up in a maze of the myriad possibilities of meaning, ofparoles with no discoverable langues, while all the possiblefunctions of language – emotive, referenial, poetic, conative, phaticand, finally, metalingual – whirl around him:

So think. Stickleback. Freshwaterfish. Freshwaterfish: greenseaman. Seaman: semen. Yes, but green: raw? spoiled?vigorous? Stickle: stubble. Or maybe scruple. Back: Bach:Bacchus: bachate: berry. Rawberry? Strawberry.

(Pricksongs and Descants, p. 63)

Through the emphasis on the arbitrary associations of sound, rhymeand image, attention is drawn to the formal organization of words inliterature and away from their referential potential. The passagecould almost be a deliberate flaunting of Jakobson’s notion ofliterary form (for a full discussion of this, see Lodge 1977a).Jakobson argues that the poetic function of language manifestsitself by projecting the paradigmatic or metaphorical dimension oflanguage (the vertical dimension which functions throughsubstitution) on to the syntagmatic or metonymic plane (thehorizontal dimension which works through combination). In thispassage, the speaker is wholly at the mercy of these internaloperations of language, condemned to the substitution of onearbitrary phoneme for another: ‘Stickleback. Freshwaterfish


[metonymic] Freshwaterfish: green seaman [metonymic/metaphoric] seaman: semen [metaphoric] . . .’

The notion of reality as a construct, explored through textualself-reference, is now firmly embedded in the contemporary novel,even in those novels that appear to eschew radically experimentalforms or techniques. Muriel Spark’s work is a good example of thisdevelopment, for she uses textual strategies of self-reference, yetstill maintains a strong ‘story’ line. This alerts the reader to thecondition of the text, to its state of ‘absence’, just as much as a novelby Sorrentino or Sarraute or any other more obviously post-modernist writer whose embodiment of the paradoxes offictionality necessitates the total rejection of traditional concepts ofplot and character.

In Spark’s first novel The Comforters (1957) the character MrsHogg (the name itself undermines the tendency of realistic fictionto assign apparently ‘arbitrary’ non-descriptive names tocharacters) forces her overwhelming physical and mental presenceupon the other characters and upon the reader. The novel, however,goes on to delight in demonstrating the impossibility of thispresence. Her physical grossness appears to be metaphorically (andconventionally realistically) related to her inner moral condition.She appears, in this sense, to be a full presence. Yet, shortly after oneof the characters utters the familiar metaphorical cliché that MrsHogg appears to be ‘not all there’, the narrator informs us that ‘assoon as Mrs Hogg stepped into her room, she disappeared, shesimply disappeared. She had no private life whatsoever, God knowswhere she went in her privacy’ (p. 154). Mrs Hogg’s absencebecomes as troublesome and problematical as her huge andphysically grotesque presence. When Caroline (the centralcharacter who becomes aware that her life is writing itself into anovel) opens the door to Mrs Hogg’s knock, she at first receives theimpression that ‘nobody was there’, and afterwards Mrs Hogg isdescribed as ‘pathetic and lumpy as a public response’ (p. 182).

The incongruous tagging of an adjective normally tied toobjects as physically palpable as Mrs Hogg to something asintangible as a ‘public response’ brings into focus the relationshipbetween her spiritual and physical reality. She is simultaneously,massively, physically present and totally, spiritually absent.

56 Metafiction

Through an ostensibly whimsical trick, Spark raises a moral pointabout the ethics of those who ‘stand for’ goodness andrighteousness and ultimately become slaves to the public image oftheir cause. Such people, like Hogg with her fanatical moralintrusiveness, thereby corrupt the inner worth of their causes.Beyond this, however, Spark also makes an ontological pointconcerning the status of fictional objects. Georgiana Hogg is apublic figure in all senses of the word because she is contained by,and exists through, the public medium of language. Thus, havingbeen designated a minor role in the plot, when not essential to itsunfolding, she does not exist. The moral and existential points areboth made through the metafictional exposure.

The device is used throughout Spark’s work, but always withsome realistic motivation. Characters are never presented merely aswords on the page. Lise, in The Driver’s Seat (1970), sustains theplot momentum by her desperate search for a man to murder her.She does not know the man but can confidently identify him: ‘notreally a presence, the lack of an absence’ (p. 71) – a remark whichcould stand, of course, as a definition of any character in fiction.Humphrey Place in The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) is given asimilar point of view when he replies to the chameleon-likeDougal’s suggestion that he take time off: ‘No I don’t agree to that .. . absenteeism is downright immoral’ (p. 49); and he later affirms,‘once you start absenting yourself you lose your self-respect’ (p.87).

Characters are absent because they are linguistic signs, andbecause they are morally deficient. In the earlier novels theconnection between the aesthetic and the moral interpretation of theword ‘absenteeism’ is based on the perceived connection betweeninventing a character in fiction and fictionalizing in life in order toescape moral responsibility and to glorify the self. In TheComforters this self is a moral reformer, Mrs Hogg. The self mightbe a great pedagogue and leader, Jean Brodie, or a great aesthete(‘each new death gave him something fresh to feel’), PercyMannering (Memento Mori (1959), p. 22). The self can even be amask, an actress, ‘something between Jane Eyre, a heroine of D. H.Lawrence and the governess in The Turn of the Screw’ – Annabel inThe Public Image (p. 20). In the later novels, Not to Disturb (1971)


or The Abbess of Crewe (1974), aesthetic and moral issues becomeinterchangeable, so the Abbess does not long for beatification butdeclares at the end of the novel: ‘I am become an object of art’ (p.125).

Characters in fiction are, of course, literally signs on a pagebefore they are anything else. The implications of this provide afairly simple creative starting point for much metafictional play. Isa character more than a word or a set of words? B. S. Johnson, forexample, is clearly drawn towards a traditional liberal-humanisttreatment of his characters and yet displays the conviction that theyexist merely as the words he chooses to put on the page. In ChristieMalry’s Own Double Entry (1973) Johnson continually intrudesinto the text to remind the reader that Christie is whatever fortuitouscollection of words happened to enter his head during composition.Yet, at his death-bed scene, the necessary human awfulness of thesituation forces Johnson to abandon his focus on verbal interactionand to shift to apparent interpersonal relationship. The author visitsChristie in hospital, ‘and the nurses suggested I leave, not knowingwho I was, that he could not die without me’ (p. 180). The self-conscious literary irony is clearly secondary to the pathos andabsurdity of the represented human situation.

Johnson uneasily accommodates a notion of ‘absence’, anawareness of the linguistic construction of the reality of the text,within a broadly based realistic framework. He never abandonsrealism in the manner of the nouveau roman, of American writerssuch as Barthelme or Brautigan, or even of such British fiction asthat of Christine Brooke-Rose and Ann Quin or Brigid Brophy’s InTransit (1969). In many of these writers’ novels the sign as sign toa large extent overtly replaces any imaginary referent such asrealism might offer. To be aware of the sign is thus to be aware of theabsence of that to which it apparently refers and the presence onlyof relationships with other signs within the text. The novel becomesprimarily a world of words, self-consciously a replacement for,rather than an appurtenance of, the everyday world.

Again, although this awareness of the problems ofrepresentation is far from new, it has clearly come to dominatecontemporary critical theory, and increasingly fiction itself. It istrue to say, though, that in most British writing the problem tends to

58 Metafiction

be explored thematically, or through macro-structures like plot andnarrative voice. The problem of ‘absence’ is here an extension of thenotion that a fictional world is created by a real author through aseries of choices about the deployment of linguistic units, butnevertheless in some sense constitutes a version of the everydayworld. The sign as sign is still, to a large extent, self-effacing in suchfiction.

Ernst Cassirer made the point that signs and symbols have toannul presence to arrive at representation. An existing object ismade knowable only through a symbol – by being translated intosomething it is not. The given can thus be known only through thenon-given (the symbol), without which we would have no access toempirical reality. As Cassirer puts it: ‘Without the relations of unityand otherness, of similarity and dissimilarity, of identity anddifference, the work of intuition can acquire no fixed form’ (quotedin Iser 1975, P. 17). In other words, it is because symbols are notreality and do not embody any of the actual properties of the worldthat they allow us to perceive this world, and ultimately to constructit for ourselves and be constructed within it. Writing necessitates‘absence’, and to this extent metafictional writers like Muriel Sparkcan be seen fictionally to embody this ultimately ‘commonsense’,rather than ‘radical’ position.

John Fowles explores the concept from a similar, finallyrealistically motivated position in his story ‘The Enigma’ (1969).The exploration is provided with a foundation in psychologicalrealism through the disappearance of the establishment figure ofJohn Marcus Fielding. The missing-person motif is, of course, oneof the best-established conventions of that supremely rationalgenre, the detective story. Here, as in Spark’s novels, however, it isused in contravention. Through the metafictional play withdefinitions of fictional character, the motif is used to suggestpossibilities which totally confound rational solution.

Fielding, as his son’s ex-girlfriend suggests, seems to havedisappeared because he felt himself, in Pirandellian fashion, to havebeen in the wrong story: ‘There was an author in his life. In a waynot a man. A system, a view of things? Something that had writtenhim. Had really made him just a character in a book’ (The EbonyTower, p. 237). Again, thematic concerns are picked up at a level of


formal self-reflexivity. Fielding, she suggests, feels himself to lackidentity. He is no ‘different’ from the stereotype of the upper-classmember of the British establishment, and the only way of escapinghis ‘typicality’ is to disappear: from the story, and from the‘typicality’, the print, of the story itself. Once he has become amystery, he exists as an individual, for ‘Nothing lasts like a mystery.On condition that it stays that way. If he’s traced, found, then it allcrumbles again. He’s back in a story, being written. A nervous break-down. A nutcase. Whatever’ (p. 239). Thus Fielding, through arecognition or ‘laying bare’ of his absence, becomes a real presencefor the first time to the other characters in the story. But Fowles asauthor can also remind the reader that Fielding exists only if hecannot be ‘traced’, only if he is more than a literary-fictional‘character’. He never allows Fielding to rewrite his own story, onlyto change its interpretation through his disappearance. In fact, theeffect of reading the hypothetical version of this disappearance isanother reminder that the character Fielding is at the disposition ofthe author Fowles. The theory of his disappearance, which might besatisfactory ‘in reality’, appears to the reader as part of a text whichhe or she knows, and is then forced to admit, is not real. Attention isthus shifted away from the solution of the mystery towards anexamination of the conventions governing the presentation ofenigma in fiction.

The fiction of Johnson, Spark and Fowles is concerned,however, with a fairly restricted notion of absence. Althoughcharacters are paraded as fictions, often this is in order to suggestthat we are all, metaphorically, fictions. This can even bereassuring: an affirmation of a substantial everyday world, howevermuch we operate in terms of its metaphorical extensions. The‘disturbance’ in a novel like Nathalie Sarraute’s The Golden Fruits(1963) is much more extreme. Here the readings of The GoldenFruits by the readers in The Golden Fruits is the novel we arereading. The subject of the book is its non-existence outside its ownrepetitions. As the characters read the book we are reading, the textcontinually turns its own third-person narrative into a first-persondiscourse. The ‘I’ continually turns the ‘he’ into a ‘you’ in his or hersous-conversation. As the novel opens, for example:

60 Metafiction

the earth opens up. Enormous crevasse. And he, on the otherside walking away without turning round . . . he should comeback . . . don’t abandon us . . . towards you . . . with you . . . onyour side . . . take hold of what I’m throwing you. . . . Tell mehave you read? . . . what did you think of it? (p. 11)

Desiring communication which is impossible because the level ofnarration is separate from the level of story, the ‘I’ attempts to treatthe text itself as an addressee. This coming together of speaker andtext is described as if they were lovers: ‘We are so close to each othernow, you are so much a part of me that if you ceased to exist, it wouldbe as if a part of me had become dead tissue’ (p. 142). The irony isthat the text, of course, is the speaker, and vice versa. Like ‘star-crossed lovers’, they are dependent upon each other for existence (amore radically metafictional treatment of the problem examined inJohnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry).

However, some British and American writing does, likeSarraute’s, operate metafictionally at the level of the sign. In JohnBarth’s ‘Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction’ (to which a noteis added: ‘the title “Autobiography” means self-composition: theantecedent of the first person narrator is not I but the story speakingof itself. I am its father, its mother is the recording machine’; Lost inthe Funhouse, p. 1), the story explicitly discusses its own ‘identity’crisis. This involves its defects – ‘absence of presence to name one’(p. 38) – and its attempts to ‘compose’ itself (p. 36), given thesedefects.

Gabriel Josipovici’s Moebius the Stripper (1974) directlyconfronts the problem of absence by reproducing the texttypographically in the form of a representation of a Möbius strip andexploring the crisis of Möbius, who has to die for the story tobecome text, who of course depends on the story for existence, butwho cannot exist because of the story.

What the various fictional examples of this chapter suggest, infact, is the extent to which the dominant issues of contemporarycritical and sociological thought are shared by writers of fiction.This reveals, as one critic has said, that:


the case of being trapped inside an outworn literary traditionmay be taken as a special symptom of the feeling that we are alltrapped in our systems for measuring and understanding theworld: that in fact there is no ‘reality’ except our systems ofmeasuring.

(Forrest-Thompson 1973, p. 4)

The next chapter will examine the nature of this ‘outworn literarytradition’ and the centrality of metafictional writing in its renewal.

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Literary self-consciousness: developments

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